Saturday, December 13, 2008
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Being Between the Passions and the Void
I make my way to finding my love for God in circles--in circles because meeting Him directly is impossible. I will be met by the Void, and the Void negates all life.
We must look at passion at its extremeties, that is, where passion tires to transcend the boundaries of the everyday, where it tries to give the body or the spirit a fuller expression of life.
I want to examine a perspective on the Christian religion that my heart wants to rejects from time to time, not knowing if it's the true perspective. My heart shrinks at the idea of faith that makes a wasteland out of our living world, one that turns anything that might gives us pleasure into just another vanity of vanities, distracting us from the task of waiting for a death that will set us free. I shrink from a relgion that turns this life into a desert. But Jesus was intimate with the desert--that harsh, unforgiving landscape, where wide empty horizons made the idea of one God easier to accept. I do not want to become intimate with the desert, but I will if I have to.
Is not Christianity a desert religion, as all the other Abrahamic relgions that were created in the desert? A contemporary poet, Rae Armentrout, wrote a poem called "Extremeties" which had the following lines: "Going to the desert is the old term"..."landscape of zeros." Yes, in the solitude of one's own mind one goes to the desert, into that landscape of zeros, a landscape that negates all passions in life, giving the material world zero-value, for a positive meaning in death. Mortal life becomes a prison, a veil of tears. St. Teresa of Avila's most famous poem is called "Vivo sin vivir en mi" (I live without living in me) and the famous refrain from the poem is "muero porque no muero" (I die because I do not die):
Oh, how long is this life!
How hard is this exile,
This prison, these irons,
In which the soul is in!
Even waiting for escape
Causes such great pain
that I die because I do not die.
Must faith be a prison of the soul? Can life, the life I live here and now, not be redeemed through the moral vision of faith? Is taking any pleasure in the mortal world a sin?
For about three weeks I attended meetings of the Religious Society of Friends, also known as the Quakers, at Haddonfield, New Jersey. At their general meetings on Sunday's, the congregation would sit in this bare rectangualar room with these thick wooden pews facing each other on all foor sides. For about an hour we would sit in silence, deep in meditative thought, interupted about two or three times each meeting by a member who felt as if his or her inner light had something to say to the congregation. The Quakers were partly inspired by psalm 46:10 which says, "Be still, and know that I am God."
In that silence I tried to quiet my mind and reject thoughts of the life around me, both my past and future. The passage from Ecclesiastes always came to mind, "Vanity of vanities all is vanity...What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." I would try to think my way through the vanities but I'd always end up at the Void, at nothingness. I would try my hardest to comtemplate the Void. But nothingness is lack of thoughts or things. There's nothing to contemplate, just absence and non-being. I would recall Buddha's thought, "That which is void is precisely form, and that which is form is precisely void." I suppose this means that even the forms present to us are already part of the void, because all things are in the active process of going from void to form, and back again in the Eternal Circle of Process, which contains all the states of everything, from black to white, from good to evil and from being to non-being. So a flower blooms and wilts an infinite number of times when you look through the veil, or your death is already part of Eternal Circle of Process, so why bemoan death when it's in a sense already happened?
But this will not do. My mind makes its dialectical turn. It wants to love God with all its heart, mind and soul and Michael Grafals will keep loving and meditating till he finds that love. It is not the Universe of Process that he wants to love, it's a personal God because That is where he will be fulfilled in his love. In the dialectical turn, I try to feel the importance of emotions in climax. For me, emotions at full force almost always takes the form of movies. Still at the Quaker meeting, I would think in montage terms. A black-and-white shot of a young rebel woman at the top of a belfry, bashing a large bell with a steel hammer. Another black-and-white shot of a mass of people rushing through the streets, crying out in joy at the death of their oppressors. Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" blares in my mind at full blast while I see a vision of fireworks bursting in all colors, joined in by the sound of people's chanting, competing with the explosions. Images of such passion! The body reacts and impels the feelings on. A couple in full embrace sink into bed sheets that billow and flow like the waves of a sea. A small child giggles, chasing the autumn leaves that chopper to the ground. Images of life pulsating!
If this was all there was to life, this would correspond to the art-religion of those 19th century aesthetics--Walter Pater and Oscar Wild. Pater, at the end of his book on the Renaissance says:
"Some spend this interval [between ones life and death] in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among 'the children of this world,' in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion–that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake."
Art for art's sake, a pleasing religion, in every sense of the phrase. The only sin this religion knows of is the sin of boredom. But it knows it's a religion of surfaces, a dance from one surface to the next that ends in oblivion. Becuase it sees nothing underneath, nothing that should be conserved for eternity, it does not strive to express this. The only thing eternal (can we even say this?) is art itself and the fleeting emotions it expresses.
But I enjoy this art purely for the senses. If this montage of feelings was for the sake of the love of God, if it was some sort of divine propaganda for our need for eternity, what paradox, and how sublime! But would the aesthetic manipulation of the senses be an honest way to express one's love for God? Would it simply be an art of decorative lies, something that aesthetics like Oscar Wilde thought poetry was, especially in his bold statement, "All bad poetry is sincere."
So there I am at the Quaker meeting, my thought process dragging itself round and round--the passions and the Void, the spirit and the blood. On a window that looked out of the meeting house, I remember a bare winter branch that would rock itself up and down with the cold winds. I was restless and I could not hardly wait to leave the meeting house to find my answers in the cold.
We must look at passion at its extremeties, that is, where passion tires to transcend the boundaries of the everyday, where it tries to give the body or the spirit a fuller expression of life.
I want to examine a perspective on the Christian religion that my heart wants to rejects from time to time, not knowing if it's the true perspective. My heart shrinks at the idea of faith that makes a wasteland out of our living world, one that turns anything that might gives us pleasure into just another vanity of vanities, distracting us from the task of waiting for a death that will set us free. I shrink from a relgion that turns this life into a desert. But Jesus was intimate with the desert--that harsh, unforgiving landscape, where wide empty horizons made the idea of one God easier to accept. I do not want to become intimate with the desert, but I will if I have to.
Is not Christianity a desert religion, as all the other Abrahamic relgions that were created in the desert? A contemporary poet, Rae Armentrout, wrote a poem called "Extremeties" which had the following lines: "Going to the desert is the old term"..."landscape of zeros." Yes, in the solitude of one's own mind one goes to the desert, into that landscape of zeros, a landscape that negates all passions in life, giving the material world zero-value, for a positive meaning in death. Mortal life becomes a prison, a veil of tears. St. Teresa of Avila's most famous poem is called "Vivo sin vivir en mi" (I live without living in me) and the famous refrain from the poem is "muero porque no muero" (I die because I do not die):
Oh, how long is this life!
How hard is this exile,
This prison, these irons,
In which the soul is in!
Even waiting for escape
Causes such great pain
that I die because I do not die.
Must faith be a prison of the soul? Can life, the life I live here and now, not be redeemed through the moral vision of faith? Is taking any pleasure in the mortal world a sin?
For about three weeks I attended meetings of the Religious Society of Friends, also known as the Quakers, at Haddonfield, New Jersey. At their general meetings on Sunday's, the congregation would sit in this bare rectangualar room with these thick wooden pews facing each other on all foor sides. For about an hour we would sit in silence, deep in meditative thought, interupted about two or three times each meeting by a member who felt as if his or her inner light had something to say to the congregation. The Quakers were partly inspired by psalm 46:10 which says, "Be still, and know that I am God."
In that silence I tried to quiet my mind and reject thoughts of the life around me, both my past and future. The passage from Ecclesiastes always came to mind, "Vanity of vanities all is vanity...What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." I would try to think my way through the vanities but I'd always end up at the Void, at nothingness. I would try my hardest to comtemplate the Void. But nothingness is lack of thoughts or things. There's nothing to contemplate, just absence and non-being. I would recall Buddha's thought, "That which is void is precisely form, and that which is form is precisely void." I suppose this means that even the forms present to us are already part of the void, because all things are in the active process of going from void to form, and back again in the Eternal Circle of Process, which contains all the states of everything, from black to white, from good to evil and from being to non-being. So a flower blooms and wilts an infinite number of times when you look through the veil, or your death is already part of Eternal Circle of Process, so why bemoan death when it's in a sense already happened?
But this will not do. My mind makes its dialectical turn. It wants to love God with all its heart, mind and soul and Michael Grafals will keep loving and meditating till he finds that love. It is not the Universe of Process that he wants to love, it's a personal God because That is where he will be fulfilled in his love. In the dialectical turn, I try to feel the importance of emotions in climax. For me, emotions at full force almost always takes the form of movies. Still at the Quaker meeting, I would think in montage terms. A black-and-white shot of a young rebel woman at the top of a belfry, bashing a large bell with a steel hammer. Another black-and-white shot of a mass of people rushing through the streets, crying out in joy at the death of their oppressors. Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" blares in my mind at full blast while I see a vision of fireworks bursting in all colors, joined in by the sound of people's chanting, competing with the explosions. Images of such passion! The body reacts and impels the feelings on. A couple in full embrace sink into bed sheets that billow and flow like the waves of a sea. A small child giggles, chasing the autumn leaves that chopper to the ground. Images of life pulsating!
If this was all there was to life, this would correspond to the art-religion of those 19th century aesthetics--Walter Pater and Oscar Wild. Pater, at the end of his book on the Renaissance says:
"Some spend this interval [between ones life and death] in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among 'the children of this world,' in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion–that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake."
Art for art's sake, a pleasing religion, in every sense of the phrase. The only sin this religion knows of is the sin of boredom. But it knows it's a religion of surfaces, a dance from one surface to the next that ends in oblivion. Becuase it sees nothing underneath, nothing that should be conserved for eternity, it does not strive to express this. The only thing eternal (can we even say this?) is art itself and the fleeting emotions it expresses.
But I enjoy this art purely for the senses. If this montage of feelings was for the sake of the love of God, if it was some sort of divine propaganda for our need for eternity, what paradox, and how sublime! But would the aesthetic manipulation of the senses be an honest way to express one's love for God? Would it simply be an art of decorative lies, something that aesthetics like Oscar Wilde thought poetry was, especially in his bold statement, "All bad poetry is sincere."
So there I am at the Quaker meeting, my thought process dragging itself round and round--the passions and the Void, the spirit and the blood. On a window that looked out of the meeting house, I remember a bare winter branch that would rock itself up and down with the cold winds. I was restless and I could not hardly wait to leave the meeting house to find my answers in the cold.
The Ghosts of Desire and the Arrows that Fly
"Contact with human creatures is given to us through the sense of perception. Contact with God is given to us through the sense of absence. Compared with absence, presence become more absent than absence."
--Simon Weil
How can we direct the way of our thoughts to manifest our love for God? If Simon Weil is correct in saying that our contact with God is given to us through the sense of absence, how can we make contact with something absent? But I think the key question is, What does it mean to desire God, let alone desire anybody?
When you love someone, do you not desire her presence in your life? In the least, do you not want to be sure that that person will always be there so you can love her and she can love you in return? That desire for someone's presence, I'm thinking of the death of a friend or family member, doesen't that make the person, now gone, seem more diffuse, more ever-present? You go into her room, the room she used to live and where you used to talk to one another, and it seems as if now that she's gone, her ghost pervades the room. She seem everywhere and nowhere. Your desire summons her, and although you never believed in ghosts, you know it's a symbol that was created for this very feeling, that ghosts really do exist, but not like in the movies. Your desires change your experience of the world, and these ghosts that are summoned by the desires of the mind, they'll change you.
Yes, desire! That's the word. Desire, which gives direction to the stream of your thoughts. Desire--so bodily, so phyisical, but so spiritual as well! Even with the desire to solve something as purely abstract as a math equation, the desire to suceed becomes bodily. You need to solve the problem, because a desire rebuked is a painful matter. Is not the failures and successes of desire one of the roots of suffering? A desire that strikes the mind is the first stage of way-making, but a desire poorly chosen can be the death of the soul.
Bob Dylan in his song "Dark Eyes" says:
"Oh, time is short and the days are sweet and passion rules the arrow that flies..."
Yes, time is short and life will nibble at your conscience, asking you time and time again--"How far are you aiming your arrows? Are they reaching as far as they can reach?" The arrow that flies? Is that not our idea that your mind moves in streams of forces, that your thoughts, moved by desire, have direction? Swept up by your desires, desires that you must freely choose, your mind, no, your whole existence moves itself through its two worlds--the physical world of people and things, and the mental world of attitudes and ideas. But in what direction should one's passion go?
Of course, people have different modes of passions. Some are passionate about collecting bottle caps, some (like me) are passionate about singing, and some are passionate about playing a sport. This is all fine, but there are passions that define the spectrum of life and death, that seem to contain all of the material world and charge it with meaning. To be passionate about playing baseball is perfectly healthy, but what if that passion contained all of life and death itself? Or what if you lived to passionately love another woman, a temptation that would surely befall me if that person filled my life with such peace and joy.
The author Robert Penn Warren, writing on Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, interpreted the death of Catherine as the discovery that "the attempt to find a substitute for universal meaning in the limited meaning of the personal relationship is doomed to failure." What happens to the soul of a man that finds that the limited meaning of a woman, baseball, singing, or whatever; what happens to this man when he finally realizes that this cannot be a substitute for a universal meaning? What Tragedy?
I make another statment to self--
"The purpose of my life is to find and live a passion that will give a purpose to my life."
--Simon Weil
How can we direct the way of our thoughts to manifest our love for God? If Simon Weil is correct in saying that our contact with God is given to us through the sense of absence, how can we make contact with something absent? But I think the key question is, What does it mean to desire God, let alone desire anybody?
When you love someone, do you not desire her presence in your life? In the least, do you not want to be sure that that person will always be there so you can love her and she can love you in return? That desire for someone's presence, I'm thinking of the death of a friend or family member, doesen't that make the person, now gone, seem more diffuse, more ever-present? You go into her room, the room she used to live and where you used to talk to one another, and it seems as if now that she's gone, her ghost pervades the room. She seem everywhere and nowhere. Your desire summons her, and although you never believed in ghosts, you know it's a symbol that was created for this very feeling, that ghosts really do exist, but not like in the movies. Your desires change your experience of the world, and these ghosts that are summoned by the desires of the mind, they'll change you.
Yes, desire! That's the word. Desire, which gives direction to the stream of your thoughts. Desire--so bodily, so phyisical, but so spiritual as well! Even with the desire to solve something as purely abstract as a math equation, the desire to suceed becomes bodily. You need to solve the problem, because a desire rebuked is a painful matter. Is not the failures and successes of desire one of the roots of suffering? A desire that strikes the mind is the first stage of way-making, but a desire poorly chosen can be the death of the soul.
Bob Dylan in his song "Dark Eyes" says:
"Oh, time is short and the days are sweet and passion rules the arrow that flies..."
Yes, time is short and life will nibble at your conscience, asking you time and time again--"How far are you aiming your arrows? Are they reaching as far as they can reach?" The arrow that flies? Is that not our idea that your mind moves in streams of forces, that your thoughts, moved by desire, have direction? Swept up by your desires, desires that you must freely choose, your mind, no, your whole existence moves itself through its two worlds--the physical world of people and things, and the mental world of attitudes and ideas. But in what direction should one's passion go?
Of course, people have different modes of passions. Some are passionate about collecting bottle caps, some (like me) are passionate about singing, and some are passionate about playing a sport. This is all fine, but there are passions that define the spectrum of life and death, that seem to contain all of the material world and charge it with meaning. To be passionate about playing baseball is perfectly healthy, but what if that passion contained all of life and death itself? Or what if you lived to passionately love another woman, a temptation that would surely befall me if that person filled my life with such peace and joy.
The author Robert Penn Warren, writing on Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, interpreted the death of Catherine as the discovery that "the attempt to find a substitute for universal meaning in the limited meaning of the personal relationship is doomed to failure." What happens to the soul of a man that finds that the limited meaning of a woman, baseball, singing, or whatever; what happens to this man when he finally realizes that this cannot be a substitute for a universal meaning? What Tragedy?
I make another statment to self--
"The purpose of my life is to find and live a passion that will give a purpose to my life."
The Greatest Weight--Thinking as Way-Making
A week ago, while I was on the Madrid metro, I had a thought that became clear for the first time, and it made my mind heavy. I mean, the feeling it gave me was similar to being lightheaded. Thank goodness I was close to my stop, all I wanted to do was go home and sit this thought through. It could have made me sick. On the metro, the seats were all occupied so I was standing up, with this feeling of mental vertigo. The idea was causing an uproar in my mind, and it kept repating itself with such force that it put all other thoughts to a halt. This is what the idea said:
"You are responsible for all the ideas, all the thoughts and all the streams of thoughts that are concieved of in your mind. Ideas are forces. These stream of forces emanate from a source, which is you, yourself. You are responsible for the course these ideas take. Your are responsible for their way. You are a way-maker. The course these forces take affect the world. They change the world. Do not think that your are not responsible for the course of your thoughts. You are condemned with this responsiblity."
But, I said to myself, what about the thoughts that are taken in through my circumstances. It may be a book someone lends me, a statement sprayed in graffiti, or one of the ideas my age in history holds as common sense. It may be the thoughts spoken to me by someone I love, or in lectures spoken by those I think wise. If these ideas force their way into my mind, am I still responsible for them?
The idea spoke to me: "But that's why there's faith. Faith is passion. But faith is also confidence. Faith is Self-Reliance, but not a reliance on that self that your peers know all too well. It's not a faith in Michael Grafals, the individual. It is not faith in a single atom apart from the universe, that thinks it holds itself in place of the Absolute. No, this is a vulgarization of self-reliance, which is faith as confidence. Self-reliance is faith in the self as interconnected with God, or as the daoist and buddhist think, the Universe. It is the self that knows (but through the paradox of faith, never knows) it has a relationship with God. It is this self-reliance, this faith as confidence in its own way-making, that will censor the ever-revolving tumult of ideas that come in through circumstances. But your not closing yourself off from circumstances. You are aware of your responsibility to the forces of your mind, and you recieve the world of circumstance responsibly."
Can you see how this idea is the greatest weight? Doesn't this make you want to stop thinking all together? Just think, every idea that comes through your mind you are in some sense responsible for. Throughout the course of your life, you'll be judged for your thoughts. An action is not just when you perform a physical action in the world, or say something that will have consequence, you are perfoming mental actions every second of your life. You are making choices between one thought and the next. Even your emotions, something that some forms of popular wisdom has cheapened, making us believe that their not under our control, yes, they too we are responsible for.
Which way will your thoughts follow? Are your thoughts in harmony with your world? Is their course the right course? Are these stream of thoughts conducive to a better world? Think responsibly, for you are all way-makers, whether you beleive it or not.
"You are responsible for all the ideas, all the thoughts and all the streams of thoughts that are concieved of in your mind. Ideas are forces. These stream of forces emanate from a source, which is you, yourself. You are responsible for the course these ideas take. Your are responsible for their way. You are a way-maker. The course these forces take affect the world. They change the world. Do not think that your are not responsible for the course of your thoughts. You are condemned with this responsiblity."
But, I said to myself, what about the thoughts that are taken in through my circumstances. It may be a book someone lends me, a statement sprayed in graffiti, or one of the ideas my age in history holds as common sense. It may be the thoughts spoken to me by someone I love, or in lectures spoken by those I think wise. If these ideas force their way into my mind, am I still responsible for them?
The idea spoke to me: "But that's why there's faith. Faith is passion. But faith is also confidence. Faith is Self-Reliance, but not a reliance on that self that your peers know all too well. It's not a faith in Michael Grafals, the individual. It is not faith in a single atom apart from the universe, that thinks it holds itself in place of the Absolute. No, this is a vulgarization of self-reliance, which is faith as confidence. Self-reliance is faith in the self as interconnected with God, or as the daoist and buddhist think, the Universe. It is the self that knows (but through the paradox of faith, never knows) it has a relationship with God. It is this self-reliance, this faith as confidence in its own way-making, that will censor the ever-revolving tumult of ideas that come in through circumstances. But your not closing yourself off from circumstances. You are aware of your responsibility to the forces of your mind, and you recieve the world of circumstance responsibly."
Can you see how this idea is the greatest weight? Doesn't this make you want to stop thinking all together? Just think, every idea that comes through your mind you are in some sense responsible for. Throughout the course of your life, you'll be judged for your thoughts. An action is not just when you perform a physical action in the world, or say something that will have consequence, you are perfoming mental actions every second of your life. You are making choices between one thought and the next. Even your emotions, something that some forms of popular wisdom has cheapened, making us believe that their not under our control, yes, they too we are responsible for.
Which way will your thoughts follow? Are your thoughts in harmony with your world? Is their course the right course? Are these stream of thoughts conducive to a better world? Think responsibly, for you are all way-makers, whether you beleive it or not.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
The Absurd Reasons of the Heart
The question "Does God exist?" is quite different from the question "What reasons do I have to believe in God?" The theologians and apologist of Christianity have often failed at being doctors of the soul. The unbeliever does not find the idea of God significant in their lives, so the doctors of faith try to calm their doubters by doing that silly business of proving God's existence, a practice that I find utterly useless and contrary to the workings of faith. Some of their arguments imply that if something, anything, created you and the universe, you must worship that Thing.
We have, for instance, the cosmological argument, as made clear by St. Thomas Aquinas, which claims that every entity that exists in the universe must be caused by something. Now if we rewind and go back from effect to cause, to effect to cause all the way to the first cause of the entire universe, there we will find God, who is the First Cause. Well, All hail the First Cause!...No, I didin't think anyone would be that passionate about worshipping that abstract, personality-less First Cause. And what if the universe was infinite? Did the universe ever start to begin with?
And we have the ontological argument, which never made sense to me. By the time I get to understanding it, I'm mentally standing on one foot, doing a one-legged hokey pokey. It does some fancy foot work in asserting that "if we can concieve of an all perfect being like God, he must exist." The only way this argument will work is in confusing atheists into belief.
But no matter if this God is the First Cause or that all pefect being of the ontological argument, we still are given no idea of the responsibilities needed in serving God, the world or our neighbors. It is ludicrous if one thinks that we can recieve a moral vision just through the basic fact of God's existence. In fact, is God's existence in this case at all significant to our existence? And even if we elegantly find the key, and the mystery of God's existence is solved absolutely, that leaves a whole menu of choices of which God(s) and which relgion to choose from. Or we can even get creative and invent our own Gods, like the well-known parody of the Flying Spaghetti Monster who created the universe with one of his noodles, or even the Invisible Pink Unicorn.
We have, for instance, the cosmological argument, as made clear by St. Thomas Aquinas, which claims that every entity that exists in the universe must be caused by something. Now if we rewind and go back from effect to cause, to effect to cause all the way to the first cause of the entire universe, there we will find God, who is the First Cause. Well, All hail the First Cause!...No, I didin't think anyone would be that passionate about worshipping that abstract, personality-less First Cause. And what if the universe was infinite? Did the universe ever start to begin with?
And we have the ontological argument, which never made sense to me. By the time I get to understanding it, I'm mentally standing on one foot, doing a one-legged hokey pokey. It does some fancy foot work in asserting that "if we can concieve of an all perfect being like God, he must exist." The only way this argument will work is in confusing atheists into belief.
But no matter if this God is the First Cause or that all pefect being of the ontological argument, we still are given no idea of the responsibilities needed in serving God, the world or our neighbors. It is ludicrous if one thinks that we can recieve a moral vision just through the basic fact of God's existence. In fact, is God's existence in this case at all significant to our existence? And even if we elegantly find the key, and the mystery of God's existence is solved absolutely, that leaves a whole menu of choices of which God(s) and which relgion to choose from. Or we can even get creative and invent our own Gods, like the well-known parody of the Flying Spaghetti Monster who created the universe with one of his noodles, or even the Invisible Pink Unicorn.
(Respectively, an image of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Invisible Pink Unicorn)
No, simply a belief in the existence of a God will not do. When I make the choice to believe wholeheartedly in a faith, I can't passionately follow the God of the philosophers and the theologians, that God of philosophy classrooms, written down as some four premise syllogism on a piece of notebook paper. No, I will believe in Jesus Christ, the only son of God, who rose from the dead for the forgivness of our sins and for the gift of everlasting life (and if your Bhuddist, Hindu or Jewish you may fill out your faith yourself). Assure yourselves in knowing that all the powers of rationality and all the mental muscle a human can muster will never prove one's faith. In brief, faith transcends reason. We know belief in the immortality of the soul is irrational, but some believe. And I won't be ashamed of believing this--proof kills faith, and faith is passionate belief.
Tertullian, one the early Christian apologist, made this quite clear. But later theologians had to legitimize their faith, making it respectable in the grand philosophical tradition of Aristotle and the Greeks. But in the fifth chapter of his Prescriptions of Heresy Tertullian gives us the most appropriate reason to believe and the most elegant proof of Jesus' death and resurrection:
"The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed because men must needs be ashamed of it. And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And He was buried, and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is impossible."
Ultimately, your faith in God lies somewhere beyond reason, just as your love for someone in your own life is based more in the immediate experience of that person, than in your reasons for loving that person. If an atheist says he found no reason to believe, and by reason he means that he found no rational reason to believe, then it's not likely this person will ever love, let alone believe in, God. I wonder how many men out there forumulate rational reasons why they love their wives or girlfriends. Now imagine someone whose absence defines the relationship.
But the part of us that reasons is only a small part of us. Remember, these experiments in faith are about the complete man of flesh and bone--the man that feels, desires, thinks and loves. When one says that he or she needs a reason to believe, they ususally do not mean a rational reason, they mean an existential reason, one that speaks to how they experience the everyday stream of moments and the those extraordinary isolated moments. So in defining for ourselves why we should believe in God, it is necessary to look at our sense of life, a life that is charged with meaning. Perhaps your reasons will be absurd for those who look from the outside, but with this faith, which for the most part is your own secret, you will work a magical transformation of the world.
Monday, November 3, 2008
Experiments in Search of the Truth
These writings are experiments of thought in search of the Truth, but only the truth as I myself as an individual can understand it, that is, through faith. Faith is a belief beyond absolute proof (but this is just one of the many definitions of faith that we'll encounter in the future). Whether it is a belief or unbelief in God it is still a matter of faith, because uncertainty is at the base of the belief. Faith plays a significant role in ordering our own private realities--our perceptions, expectations, and our attitudes towards life. Thus, these writings are experiments in faith, examining the consquences in beliving specifically in the Christian God, the God of Love--the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Although we will be dealing with theology, these are existential experiements. I'll be asking questions like, What happens to the man, the man of flesh and bone who must work, sleep and wake up every morning and live constantly in the everyday, what happens to this man when he tries to fulfill Jesus' most important commadment?:
"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." (Mark 12:30)
But more important and mysterious to me is not only what happens to this man, or what this man believes in, but how does this man fulfill this commadment. How can you love God the way Jesus commands us to do? But let me not jump ahead of my readers, because for the unbelievers and for those of little faith, the first question is not how do I love God, but why.
I once asked an atheist, when I was practically one myself, why he did not believe in God. "Because," he said, "I have no reason to believe in God." And at the time it struck me as a very profound reason not to believe in God. In times of doubt this statement still weighs on me. Not only is there disbelief in this person because he has not found some neat syllogism to convince him to believe, but he finds nothing of practical benefit in believing in a God. He has this feeling of being self-sufficient, self-reliant and independent from any need of divine guidance. He can, he thinks, take on the world alone with his own values and his own morality. What can God do to make his life better? So pragmatic, so economically-consiouss and oh so rational.
What are some of the reasons to believe in God? Let us see some reasons:
1. Your soul will have eternal life, you will never die and you will not suffer in Hell.
2. You will strive for self-excellence under the authority of your faith and work towards the perfection of the world.
3. You will care for your soul to recognize the proper beauty of others and the world as bestowed upon by the love of God.
The next thoughts will sow much doubts but they must be spoken of. The first reason, the most important and the one most emphasized by Jesus in the Gospels, affects us the most because it is simply a matter of life and death. "The fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Prov. 1:7). This statement is true in that it wakes us up from the pull of the everyday and makes us realize that death is inevitable and that we must prepare for its arrival. But I find believing in God solely for the sake of living forever an idea that is morally and spiritually weak. The project of faith is reduced to an economic trade-off: I give my life for God for the better reward of recieving eternal life and avoiding Hell. Any notion of sacrifice is gone. Sacrifice is when one gives something to an idea or person higher than themselves without expecting something significantly better to come out of it. Anything else would be the equivalent to buying something at the market. The atheist makes fun of this belief as a "pie-in-the-sky" belief, a faith that uses our sense of fear and want of reward to act in a certain way. The hard-boiled atheist will not be seduced by this reason.
The next two reasons are rejected by unbelievers because they want to live their own self-excellence, have their own opinions of beauty and live under the liberty of their own morality. The idea of succumbing their own private faiths to a faith in a divine authority is revolting to them, as if it was slavery. This, for those thinking under the Christian faith, is the sin of pride, consider by many christians to be the worst of sins. Although one should later make the distinction between proper pride and improper pride, this kind of pride completely annihilates the individual's dependence on God. It is an individualism that is human, all too human. It is radical humanism at its very essence. For thinkers like Albert Camus, there is a heroism to this radical humanism. It can be a form of rebellion against the absurd, an assertive defiance against death and nihilism. John Milton's Satan of Paradise Lost and Lord Byron's Byronic Hero are just some of the literary manifestations of this pride. But when these characters once appeared in the imaginations of geniuses, you probably will see feebler versions of these characters more than once tomorrow morning.
But what about the answer to the question, "Why should I believe in God?" I cannot answer this with absolute reasoned certainty. I can only witness what happens after faith works its visionary transformation. My only "because" will be the fruits of my labor. But something tells me that even this will remain a secret from you, that only the your own individual acts of faith can reveal it's consequences.
I therefore ask God this: "I do not expect the Lord to give me anything in this life. I only ask Him to help me see differently."
Believing is Seeing
"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." (Mark 12:30)
But more important and mysterious to me is not only what happens to this man, or what this man believes in, but how does this man fulfill this commadment. How can you love God the way Jesus commands us to do? But let me not jump ahead of my readers, because for the unbelievers and for those of little faith, the first question is not how do I love God, but why.
I once asked an atheist, when I was practically one myself, why he did not believe in God. "Because," he said, "I have no reason to believe in God." And at the time it struck me as a very profound reason not to believe in God. In times of doubt this statement still weighs on me. Not only is there disbelief in this person because he has not found some neat syllogism to convince him to believe, but he finds nothing of practical benefit in believing in a God. He has this feeling of being self-sufficient, self-reliant and independent from any need of divine guidance. He can, he thinks, take on the world alone with his own values and his own morality. What can God do to make his life better? So pragmatic, so economically-consiouss and oh so rational.
What are some of the reasons to believe in God? Let us see some reasons:
1. Your soul will have eternal life, you will never die and you will not suffer in Hell.
2. You will strive for self-excellence under the authority of your faith and work towards the perfection of the world.
3. You will care for your soul to recognize the proper beauty of others and the world as bestowed upon by the love of God.
The next thoughts will sow much doubts but they must be spoken of. The first reason, the most important and the one most emphasized by Jesus in the Gospels, affects us the most because it is simply a matter of life and death. "The fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Prov. 1:7). This statement is true in that it wakes us up from the pull of the everyday and makes us realize that death is inevitable and that we must prepare for its arrival. But I find believing in God solely for the sake of living forever an idea that is morally and spiritually weak. The project of faith is reduced to an economic trade-off: I give my life for God for the better reward of recieving eternal life and avoiding Hell. Any notion of sacrifice is gone. Sacrifice is when one gives something to an idea or person higher than themselves without expecting something significantly better to come out of it. Anything else would be the equivalent to buying something at the market. The atheist makes fun of this belief as a "pie-in-the-sky" belief, a faith that uses our sense of fear and want of reward to act in a certain way. The hard-boiled atheist will not be seduced by this reason.
The next two reasons are rejected by unbelievers because they want to live their own self-excellence, have their own opinions of beauty and live under the liberty of their own morality. The idea of succumbing their own private faiths to a faith in a divine authority is revolting to them, as if it was slavery. This, for those thinking under the Christian faith, is the sin of pride, consider by many christians to be the worst of sins. Although one should later make the distinction between proper pride and improper pride, this kind of pride completely annihilates the individual's dependence on God. It is an individualism that is human, all too human. It is radical humanism at its very essence. For thinkers like Albert Camus, there is a heroism to this radical humanism. It can be a form of rebellion against the absurd, an assertive defiance against death and nihilism. John Milton's Satan of Paradise Lost and Lord Byron's Byronic Hero are just some of the literary manifestations of this pride. But when these characters once appeared in the imaginations of geniuses, you probably will see feebler versions of these characters more than once tomorrow morning.
But what about the answer to the question, "Why should I believe in God?" I cannot answer this with absolute reasoned certainty. I can only witness what happens after faith works its visionary transformation. My only "because" will be the fruits of my labor. But something tells me that even this will remain a secret from you, that only the your own individual acts of faith can reveal it's consequences.
I therefore ask God this: "I do not expect the Lord to give me anything in this life. I only ask Him to help me see differently."
Believing is Seeing
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
